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Friday, 14 October 2016

The Spiritual side of Aso Villa By Reuben Abati

People tend to be alarmed when the Nigerian Presidency takes certain
decisions. They don’t think the decision makes sense. Sometimes, they
wonder if something has not gone wrong with the thinking process at that
highest level of the country.

I have heard people insist that there is some form of witchcraft at work
in the country’s seat of government. I am ordinarily not a
superstitious person, but working in the Villa, I eventually became
convinced that there must be something supernatural about power and
closeness to it. I’ll start with a personal testimony. I was given an
apartment to live in inside the Villa. It was furnished and equipped.
But when my son, Michael arrived, one of my brothers came with a pastor
who was supposed to stay in the apartment. But the man refused claiming
that the Villa was full of evil spirits and that there would soon be a
fire accident in the apartment. He complained about too much human
sacrifice

around the Villa and advised that my family must never sleep overnight inside the Villa.

I thought the man was talking nonsense and he wanted the luxury of a
hotel accommodation. But he turned out to be right. The day I hosted
family friends in that apartment and they slept overnight, there was
indeed a fire accident. The guests escaped and they were so thankful.
Not long after, the President’s physician living two compounds away had a
fire accident in his home. He and his children could have died. He
escaped with bruises. Around the Villa while I was there, someone always
died or their relations died. I can confirm that every principal
officer suffered one tragedy or the other; it was as if you needed to
sacrifice something to remain on duty inside that environment. Even some
of the women became merchants of dildo because they had suffered a
special kind of death in their homes (I am sorry to reveal this) and
many of the men complained about something that had died below their
waists too. The ones who did not have such misfortune had one ailment or
the other that they had to nurse. From cancer to brain and prostate
surgery and whatever, the Villa was a hospital full of agonizing
patients.

I recall the example of one particular man, an asset to the

Jonathan
Presidency who practically ran away from the Villa. He said he needed
to save his life. He was quite certain that if he continued to hang
around, he would die. I can’t talk about colleagues who lost daughters
and sons, brothers and uncles, mothers and fathers, and the many
obituaries that we issued. Even the President was multiply bereaved. His
wife, Mama Peace was in and out of hospital at a point , undergoing
many surgeries. You may have forgotten but after her husband lost the
election and he conceded victory, all her ailments vanished, all
scheduled surgeries were found to be no longer necessary and since then
she has been hale and hearty. By the same token, all those our
colleagues who used to come to work to complain about a certain death
beneath their waists and who relied on videos and other instruments to
entertain wives (take it easy boys, I don’t mean nay harm, I am
writing!), have all experienced a re-awakening.

Every one who
went under the blade has received miraculous healing, and we are happy
to be out of that place. But others were not so lucky. They died. There
were days when convoys ran into ditches and lives were lost. In Norway,
our helicopter almost crashed into a mountain. That was the first time I
saw the President panicking, The weather was all so hazy and he just
kept

saying it would not be nice for the President of a country
to die in a helicopter crash due to pilot miscalculations. The President
went into a prayer mode. We survived. In Kenya once, we had a bird
strike. The plane had to be recalled and we were already airborne with
the plane acting like it would crash. During the 2015 election
campaigns, our aircraft refused to start on more than one occasion. The
aircraft just went dead. On some other occasions, we were stoned and
directly targeted for evil. I really don’t envy the people who work in
Aso Villa, the seat of Nigeria’s Presidency. For about six months, I
couldn’t even breathe properly. For another two months, I was on
crutches. But I considered myself far luckier than the others who were
either nursing a terminal disease or who could not get it up.

When Presidents make mistakes, they are probably victims of a force
higher than what we can imagine. Every student of Aso Villa politics
would readily admit that when people get in there, they actually become
something else. They act like they are under a spell. When you issue a
well- crafted statement, the public accepts it wrongly. When the
President makes a speech and he truly means well, the speech is
interpreted wrongly by the public. When a policy is introduced, somehow,
something just goes

wrong. In our days, a lot of people used to
complain that the APC people were fighting us spiritually and that
there was a witchcraft dimension to the governance process in Nigeria.
But the APC folks now in power are dealing with the same demons. Since
Buhari government assumed office, it has been one mistake after another.
Those mistakes don’t look normal, the same way they didn’t look normal
under President Jonathan. I am therefore convinced that there is an evil
spell enveloping this country. We need to rescue Nigeria from the
forces of darkness. Aso Villa should be converted into a spiritual
museum, and abandoned.

Should I become President of Nigeria
tomorrow, I will build a new Presidential Villa: a Villa that will be
dedicated to the all-conquering Almighty, and where powers and
principalities cannot hold sway. But it is not about buildings and
space, not so?. It is about the people who go to the highest levels in
Nigeria. I really don’t quite believe in superstitions, but I am tempted
to suggest that this is indeed a country in need of prayers, We should
pray before people pack their things into Aso Villa. We should ask God
to guide us before we appoint Ministers. We should, to put it in
technocratic language, advise that the people should be very vigilant.
We have all

failed so far, that crucial test of vigilance. We
should have a Presidential Villa where a President can afford to be
human and free. In the White House, in the United States, Presidents
live like normal human beings. In Aso Villa, that is impossible. They’d
have to surround themselves with cooks from their villages, bodyguards
from their mother’s clans and friends they can trust. It should be
possible to be President of Nigeria without having to look behind one’s
shoulders. But we are not yet there. So, how do we run a Presidency
where the man in the saddle can only drink water served by his kinsman?
No. How can we possibly run a Presidency where every President proclaims
faith in Nigeria but they are better off in the company of relatives
and kinsmen. No. We need as Presidents men and women who are wiling to
be Nigerians. No Nigerian President should be in spiritual bondage
because he belongs to all of us and to nobody.

Now let me go
back to the spiritual dimension. A colleague once told me that I was the
most naïve person around the place. I thought I was a bright, smart,
professional doing my bit and enjoying the President’s confidence. I
spelled it out. But what I got in response was that I was coming to the
villa using Lux soap,

but that most people around the place
always bathed in the morning with blood. Goat blood. Ram blood. Whatever
animal blood. I argued. He said there were persons in the Villa walking
upside down, head to the ground. I screamed. Everybody looked normal to
me. But I soon began to suspect that I was in a strange environment
indeed. Every position change was an opportunity for warfare. Civil
servants are very nice people; they obey orders, but they are not very
nice when they fight over personal interests.

The President is
most affected by the atmosphere around him. He can make wrong decisions
based on the cloud of evil around him. Even when he means well and he
has taken time to address all possible outcomes, he could get on the
wrong side of the public. A colleague called me one day and told me a
story about how a decision had been taken in the spiritual realm about
the Nigerian government. He talked about the spirit of error, and how
every step taken by the administration would appear to the public like
an error. He didn’t resign on that basis but his words proved prophetic.
I see the same story being re-enacted. Aso Villa is in urgent need of
redemption. I never slept in the apartment they gave me in that Villa
for an hour.